Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
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They never saw their homeland or most of their friends or relatives ever again.
They must have known that was the way it was going to be. I often wonder how they felt about it.
Although we have experienced a sad regression in our space capabilities, there is nothing in principle preventing us from sending humans and basic building blocks there, let them build a decent base, and then instate a regular shuttling service. Even if building the outpost takes 10 years, that's not the same as sending them onto a suicide mission as the article implies.
We're missing a lot of necessary infrastructure for this though, and without it the stated Sept. 2022 launch date might as well be 2122 or even 4022. We'll need a moon base to stage this thing (not only the initial flight but more importantly the supply line), and if we're serious about expanding into the solar system, one or two space elevators are probably a necessity. The political will to build any of these, never mind maintaining them, does not exist. We're too busy propping up corrupt political and financial systems, not to mention the importance of waging an eternal war the expenses of which could provide enough for a decent colonialization program many times over.
Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem.
I think you misunderstand. While the linked article is brief, the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills, but to supply them for the next 40-80 years from Earth.
Because of the hilarities of the rocket equation, it is cheaper to send rocket after rocket full of water, breathable air, food, fuel, and other supplies than it is to send enough rocket fuel for a return trip. Like, way cheaper. As the article says, the technology for a return trip just doesn't exist; the technology for a series of one-way trips does.
Maybe I got caught up in the ridiculousness of the article's sensational tone, but even so there is no technical reason to actually plan on never having return flights. This relates directly to your other statement:
As I wrote in the parent comment, the presence of water on Mars allows for the production of rocket fuel on site. This ties in to where I mentioned extended infrastructure such as a space elevator and a Moon base, because those too will make trips back and forth economical (instead of scraping everything together for a singular "by the skin of our teeth" mission like this one).
I wrote about these points for a reason ;)
Implying that we won't come up with that technology by the time we get people there.
There's also a real possibility that the technology doesn't exist. There's an even greater possibility that it does, and we arn't capable of comprehending it.
That hasn't been the plan for a long time. NASA's Design Reference Mission, and the one anyone who has studied Mars missions at any point in the past 20 years, is to manufacture fuel on Mars. In fact, you would probably send this equipment to Mars first so that the astronauts going to Mars would have a fully fueled return ship ready and waiting for them before they even take off from Earth.
"MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES,
BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS,
CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND
RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS."My biggest fear would be having the novelty wear off and coming to the realization that I just moved to a trailer park.. on mars.
For people with drive and know how there would be as much excitement as they desire.
"Polyakov underwent medical assessments before, during, and after the flight. He also underwent two follow-up examinations six months after returning to Earth. When researchers compared the results of these medical exams, it was revealed that although there were no impairments of cognitive functions, Polyakov experienced a clear decline in mood as well as a feeling of increased workload during the first few weeks of spaceflight and return to Earth.[6][7] However, Polyakov's mood stabilized to pre-flight levels between the second and fourteenth month of his mission. It was also revealed that Polyakov did not suffer from any prolonged performance impairments after returning to Earth. In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a stable mood and overall function could be maintained during extended duration spaceflights, such as manned missions to Mars."
The problem with trailer parks is not the trailers; it's the other people
and the ownership model. It's a terrible ownership model, really; you usually own a (not actually mobile) manufactured home, but you rent the land.
The screwed up thing is that when the rent goes up in the park, the value of your mobile home drops, making moving even harder.
I'd be happy to live in one of the bay-area mobile home parks if the ownership model of the land was more like the condo ownership model, where the tenants own the common areas, well, in common.
But yeah. "who else is on the trip" would certainly be my first question, but I would imagine that you'd mostly get interesting people.
Whether this project has any point at all is a question of rational thinking vs. mass psychology. Scientists will tell you that it is pointless to send humans to Mars. All research can be done with robots - cheaper and without endangering human life.
However, a human colony on Mars might generate irrational public excitement which in return could lead to governments investing more money into space travel and colonization again.
I said irrational excitement because we know we can do it. NASA simply hasn't done it because there is neither money nor a rational reason for it. If the US government wanted to NASA could have a Mars colony up and running in no time. As the article points out the technology already exists.
Personally I believe the irrational excitement factor will be a strong one and thus these people who basically sign up to die of radiation poisoning will end up being true "space pioneers".
However, I doubt that Mars One will actually manage to secure the necessary funding. So I am not getting excited about this yet.
But as I grew into adult life, and visited more than one country here on Earth, I began to think that it is an even higher and more challenging ambition to go somewhere you are not constrained to go by desire for fame or for riches or for being the first in a new territory, but rather by a desire to solve intractable problems. Solving a problem of long standing is a bigger achievement than solving a problem that is unsolved mostly just because no one has found it worthwhile to solve it. Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is a problem for which some example solutions exist, just as traveling to other planets has some precedent in the manned moon missions and in robot space probes, but I suggest it is actually a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life. I still admire astronauts, and I've exposed all four of my children to books and films about space exploration, but I'd be even more thrilled to see them or other young people I know take on the exploration challenge of bringing about improvement in the lives of their fellow human beings in the worst-off parts of planet Earth. There is a lot of challenging science involved in those problems, and the contributions to human knowledge that will come from solving those problems will provide lasting benefit to all of humankind, whatever planet our descendants live on.
AFTER EDIT: Two comments below mention "paternalism." Nope. I am talking about "fraternalism," sharing in the life of the people where you live, understanding their problems deeply because they become your problems too, and then building solutions from the neighborhoods you live in. You can't jet-set that in, and you can't phone it in or international consultant it in, you can only live it in. I've asked before here on Hacker News how many of the participants here have ever even lived in (not just visited, but lived in) a third-world country. Not many have. (I have, and it was a dictatorship when I lived there, and as a foreign national I was part of the process of nudging it to become the democracy it is today.) To be a brother of your fellow human beings is a great adventure. It's harder than armchair criticism, but also more challenging and interesting.
But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get into a position to even make any change.
Thus, this endeavour is practically impossible — it's already difficult enough to change something in your fatherland.
AFTER tokenadult's EDIT: Your edit clarifies a lot. But fraternalism is still difficult to achieve: if you are from a different race than the native population, you'll have a hard time being accepted as their representative.
An interesting example for this might be Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew pushed the country from third to first world in 50 years. Although he is Singaporean, he brought in a lot of foreign knowledge as he had studied abroad. And the same issues with corruption/illegal methods some commenters mention here can be observed: in the early days of his career, he arrested his opponents, the communists, without any legal process to prevent them from jeopardizing his plans. Later, he made some radical decisions, that were not widely accepted by the population, bu that led to better results for the country (for example, he tore down old villages to replace them by high-rise buildings).
If you want to change a foreign country for the better and not make a bloody (literally) mess of it, stay away from politics (ok, bribe who you need to to keep you humanitarian organization afloat if needed) and work to improve education, basic healthcare and economic growth by means of bringing foreign investments to businesses in a poor country or things like that. Any other way to do it and you'll probably end up on "the dark side" sooner or later :)
Satellite TV (Al Jazeera and western sitcoms) largely accomplished this for information in the greater Islamic world. Doing the same for non-information goods would require actual infrastructure on the ground, though.
To actually be able to use a PMC for such situations, you'd need the kind of force that could win a fight/kidnapping situation by using non-lethal force against lethal force, because using lethal force will put you on one side or another and compromise everything. And to be able to reliably win a non-lethal vs. lethal force situation you'd basically need your PMC to be more advanced and well trained than the US military (!!), at least on the non-lethal weaponry and people manipulation parts... and at that point something like the US (or other "big guys" with interest in the region) would perceive you as a potential treat to them, despite your humanitarian mission, bringing up whole new levels of "fun" :)
Sorry for the pessimism, but these is why I don't like touching this kinds of problems, as I can only find an infinite amount of reasons of why things wouldn't work.
It would be easier to stick to services like running an airport (eg Mogadishu kept operating...), water, hospitals, power, etc. but another option would be to run "refugee/IDP centers" like the UN allegedly was doing in the Balkans (where they failed spectacularly). If people live inside a camp they are relatively easy to protect.
The point behind lethal force by a PMC is to have overwhelming force. Blackwater had an Air Force, and essentially could call in favors from the CIA and DOD as needed. Outside of the 2004 Fallujah incident, they never were in serious trouble, and after 2004, the USMC basically tore the city apart, largely over the bridge incident.
There would be no way to do this kind of thing without US support (tacit or otherwise) and at least non objection by regional powers, but if you stuck to "help IDPs and execute on international obligations" you would get UN, USAID, etc funding. The issue is that most people in NGOs tend to be bleeding hearts, and also humanities people vs infrastructure people, so thy don't have these capabilities in house; they have to contract them in. The exception are medical groups -- there are huge numbers of great medical facilities run by religious and other charities, and their neutrality is generally respected.
If you create a business that solves a local problem (local to the poor country of choice) good enough, and fairly enough, you can create ripple effects. Maybe not at national levels, but at regional and municipal levels.
Not easy, but not impossible.
(At least I hope so when I got my rose-tinted glasses on.)
We mostly know the solutions to fixing the most oppressed or otherwise defective parts of the world; we just don't find it worthwhile to implement those solutions. I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for <$10mm and a promise of immunity from prosecution or extradition by major world powers (i.e. places I'd actually be, afterward). Scaling that up for other countries is possible, too. For problems not requiring a ballistic solution, Bill Gates is doing a seriously effective job of solving the polio problem, and major headway into malaria.
The solutions to the most defective countries are all pretty straightforward and widely known; it's figuring out how to turn decent but not ideal countries like Pakistan into really stable first-world countries which would be hard, or figuring out how to stem the long-term decline in the US. (Yes, there are implementation difficulties in a place like Somalia, but it's because the benefit isn't worth the expense in blood/treasure. The cheap solution is to let the 1% of people who could make their lives a lot better by leaving do so.)
The skills required to solve the harder sociological problems don't really have much overlap with the skills to send people to Mars.
Bringing those places up to standard doesn't really give you anything new, although it does help those people. Putting humans on Mars is something we've never done before, and could lead to amazing technologies and opportunities for humanity. Just like I'd rather be a medical researcher than a family practice doctor, I'd rather push the limits of what's possible vs. contribute to more widespread adequacy, although both bring up the mean. I'm glad there exist both kinds of people, though.
How so? And why is immunity required?
But who will replace them? Didn't we try something like this during the Cold War multiple times and end up introducing even more totalitarian "democratic" governments?
I don't think the US really tried replacing with "democratic" governments, either -- just with US allied dictators. We supported a lot of really evil people because they brought stability and nominal pro-US interests. I'm not advocating that; I'm just saying get rid of some bad leadership with virtually anyone else, with no ongoing agenda. That is a far lower bar to cross.
Oh really? What's your plan? How do you intend on ensuring that culture is preserved while you implement this plan? Or do you believe that Western culture is superior because it has been more successful in the last 100 years (forgetting that segregation ended less than 50 years ago, if you must include the eradication of entire populations as "successes," we can call it 500 years)? Even Bill Gates will admit that his solutions are imperfect at times.
The tricky part is a sustainable solution. Sure, you can throw money at problems, but how is the solution going to last? Like you said, there is already a lot of money involved (e.g. Bill Gates) in philanthropy, yet the problems haven't been solved yet. This indicates that the solution is trickier than you think. And if there is someone smart enough to engineer a solution, I would like to think Bill Gates is very qualified for such a position.
EDIT: Mainly, if you don't account for the culture of a place, a solution will likely not be popular enough to work (HIV prevention and treatment suffers from this problem).
The less violent solution would be a trade embargo of the country (at least, not allowing them to sell oil).
Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in their government.
"Oil for food" in Iraq in the 1990s was a horrible fiasco, but there have been cases where natural resource wealth hasn't been strictly a curse.
For ongoing security and government assistance, probably the only entity able to credibly do anything in EG is the AU, which has become a lot more credible in the past 5-10 years.
Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.
I think this would both fix the corruption problem as well as restore faith in government.
You are 95% right. The problem is, the third party always decides it might be a good idea to take something for themselves, and we're right back where we started.
But I don't buy the idea that it's not possible, it's just never been tried before.
All that would do is wind up killing a bunch of 3rd party candidates and anti-establishment types. You can't simply place a law and then expect it to be 100% accurate let alone the people determining guilt be 100% ethical. A corrupt judge could kill a whole lot of people with this type of law.
And maybe structurally changing how oil revenues are handled; not allowing any new leader to directly control them for personal benefit.
Shantanu - You're right. Simply throwing money cannot solve global issues and no single person including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett combined have the monetary resources at their disposal to tackle even 5% of global issues. However, they're the right kind of people to take on sociological challenges and eradicating diseases because there's a lot more to the problem than that. For instance, bureaucracy, corruption, beliefs, natural causes, etc. I was really surprised (shouldn't have been) to learn that a significant portion of their funds are allocated for dealing with corrupt governments for our mission to globally eradicate diseases like Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc. With my limited experience in that realm, I can state that the problem is definitely way more complex than it appears at the surface (and I think you get that as well).
It very rarely works out.
There are a few cases where US/NATO intervention has been sort of helpful. Panama is probably better now that we got rid of Noriega, although we put him there in the first place. The Balkans at least didn't turn into a pan-European or WW3. French intervention in Mali seems at least not to be making things worse, and while they went into Rwanda late, they did at least settle things down. Australian forces actually did a lot of good in PNG/ET from what I've read, although I don't know too much about it.
Somehow Balkan conficts never got critical review from journalists and rosy propaganda stayed even to this day.
For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed.
My point is that those conflicts were stirred by industrial lobby's, not by genuine need to protect or save anyone.
Would you mind saying which country you're from? I ask because I have recently met Serbians who seem like very good and reasonable people, but who have very different views on the conflict from the accepted view in the States and "Western" Europe. In particular, they are very nostalgic for Yugoslavia, and seem to think that yes, some bad things happened during the war, but that no one in particular was more genocidal than anyone else.
"For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed."
This is very surprising. I would love to see the source. Croatia is the only Balkan state now part of the EU… perhaps they'll find it rather easy to emigrate where they please.
Look, EG is, I'm pretty certain, almost 90% Fang. That probably doesn't mean much to you but for Africans... tribal affinities matter. The idea that you would get rid of one government, and another would govern appreciably differently in EG is fanciful. Add to that Oil and then unexploited Gold and Zinc deposits, and anyone who is familiar with Africa, and especially EG, would laugh heartily at your assertions.
Places like the MidEast and North Africa also have more issues than can be solved by changing governments. For instance, the reality in Somalia, or indeed even Egypt, is that there are hard Bio-Physical resource constraints that are not going away. Desertification and Soil Salination are mother nature's method of breathing. And she doesn't care about governmental edicts. Egypt's population is around 80M I think... and I'm pretty sure the arable land is right around 2% and it drops every year. Somalia is what... 10 maybe 15 million? With MORE diversity (ie - tribes) and even LESS arable land.
One of the first things I learned working at Halliburton was that if a nation is importing energy AND food... it's in trouble. Nation building is much more than Civil Affairs. If the requisite people and materials aren't there ... it doesn't work. Full Stop.
"Bad" governments, for a given definition of "bad", are symptoms of problems. Not the problems themselves. The Taliban and the NA are manifestations of the lack of resources in Afghan land and the lack of trust among Afghan people. These are difficult problems to solve. And certainly simply changing the government will not make them go away.
More importantly, decades of war have also essentially eliminated any societal reserves of trust, so corruption at all levels is the default. The only functional unit is the family or clan, and very minimal ties to higher units of a tribe -- not to the state. Individual governors, mayors, and police chiefs rule by personal charisma and graft, and bringing their pre-existing tribal relationships in. Organs of the state end up used to settle personal vendettas, too.
There's a lot of literature that national resources (extractive, with low local labor involvement) are a curse -- the "resource curse". Norway has done ok with its oil. Gulf societies have in some ways succeeded but in other ways oil has crippled them. African countries with mineral wealth usually end up relatively fucked compared to countries with productive agriculture or a vibrant commercial sector (Nigeria minus oil is actually pretty decent; Kenya is great. Ghana until recently had no resource based wealth and is basically the Chile of Africa).
The "stratfor" "geography drives political destiny" thing isn't predictive for small oil-rich countries. I mean, look at the smaller Gulf states. The issues in small oil-rich countries are essentially down to leadership. A broad democratic government is probably not the achievable goal, but something like Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, most of the Emirates, or Kuwait is far superior to EG.
I take issue with this. Technological advancement over the last few millenia has been driven by how many smart minds we have at the table thinking of new ideas and new solutions to old problems. To get more folks at the table, we need for them to stop worrying about how to avoid gulags, and get them start training in emerging fields. People in Vietnam studying computer science will bring more technological marvels to your world than sending a rocket and biodome to Mars, the problems of which could mostly be tackled by first building biodomes in harsh environments on Earth, or by finding ways to conquer disease and get fresh water to more of the world's poor.
Build me a sealab and irrigate the Sahara, you don't need Mars to start working on those problems, and those problems could probably help you learn really important skills for Martian exploration (and eventual terraforming) while providing more immediate technological benefits to humanity.
Maybe you really do know the best solutions to every country's problems. Or maybe you know enough "rules of thumb" to get each of these countries to start moving in the right direction. That is not my point.
However, one "meta" problem is that most people are convinced that they know the solutions to the world's problems, and if everybody else would let them execute their solution, the world would be fixed.
That kind of paternalistic nonsense is what got those countries into the terrible shape they're in to begin with. Continuing it isn't going to fix anything.
On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive
Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation.
There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.
Here we come, with our advanced ways, to fix problems you might not even consider problems.
On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive
Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation.
There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.
I do not see any evidence of this in the grandparent post.
Edit: Also, I'd like to point out this, on the same front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420
Involving yourself in foreign politics is no substitute for going to Mars. Even if you magically turn Zimbabwe into a political and economic clone of Alabama, the overall capabilities and prospects of mankind remain substantially the same. Successful manned flight that expands our species to another planet is much more admirable and worthwhile from this point of view.
I disagree. Advancement is directly related to how many minds we can free up to work on intellectual pursuits. Even before Moore's law, publications and rate of invention largely tracked with size of population (minus the portion preoccupied with agriculture).
Going to Mars involves calibrating some rockets and making a sustainable habitat for long periods of time. Hard problems, to be sure, but there's nothing about that trip we would do without thoroughly testing it first on Earth. We mostly know how to send projectiles throughout the solar system, and we mostly know that long term stays in space suck, and we mostly know that robots and telescopes pay back orders of magnitude more in scientific discoveries than equivalent manned missions for the cost. (ie, manned missions have the mirrors on the moon and tang, hubble and curiosity have contributed far more to space science...)
Which country are you a citizen of?
You will recall that I didn't use the term "third world" in the first part of my first comment in this thread, but categorized countries in two other categories, at least one of which could definitely include countries that aren't part of the Third World. My use of the term came after an edit to the comment, in which I wrote, "I've asked before here on Hacker News how many of the participants here have ever even lived in (not just visited, but lived in) a third-world country. Not many have."
your post is extremely condescending.
Could you please explain in detail what part of my post you were reading when you reached that conclusion? You see, I have done what I suggested in my post. I have lived in a country where I wasn't born, where it was nearly impossible for me to gain citizenship, where the language(s) spoken were not my native language, where the climate was different from the climate I knew in childhood, where the cuisine was very different, where the level of wealth (then) was low. In that country, when I lived there, secret police assassins killed not only dissidents in that country, but even dissidents from that country who had settled in the United States to live. The ruling political party owned all but one of the newspapers (in that newspaper, it had just a half share) and all of the television stations, and it tightly controlled radio broadcasting and book publishing and motion picture production.
There was a lot of censorship and internal spying there, but local people told me their stories of their aspirations for freedom. I learned which ideals of the ruling party could be turned to embarrass the ruling party as it spied on me and other foreigners while we discussed what we were learning about life there from our local friends. I spoke there in open public speeches (in the official language of that country, which I was there to learn) about how life in the country could be improved for the common people by actually allowing freedom and subjecting the rule of the ruling party to the discipline of a free press and free and fair elections. Those things happen there now. I still have many friends there. What is condescending about desiring that the common people of every country achieve their dreams?
Literally on the one hand I want to say "sign me up!" and yet on the other hand, after my experience living in isolation and without so many comforts in Bangladesh, I do worry I'd regret giving up on so much to move to Mars.
Alienation, isolating, and the lack of comforts give you a lot of time to think, and it's easy to think you've made a mistake. I wouldn't want to be haunted by that feeling. On the other hand, to explore red martian rocks on the edge of human civilization... it has a romantic appeal.
When romantic appeal and "the real thing" meet, sometimes it's not all happy.
No matter how successful you are at creating utopia, there are many more people that have an interest in engineering the failure of both you and your creation, and each one of them is a human that is potentially as capable as yourself, if not more so. They will collectively outlive you, their efforts will be relentless, and the knowledge that they gain in undoing your work will also be passed down to future generations.
With that in mind, the relative worthiness of efforts might not fall hard to the side of solving political problems right at this instant.
Sending some pioneers who are willing to accept far higher risk, first, before a mainstream effort which could support thousands, actually seems like a way to increate demand and lower risk (and thus cost) for the colonization mission. If 5-10 people living on Mars for 5 years ahead of you kills all desire to actually colonize the place in a lasting way, then it probably wasn't worth doing in the first place.
You're probably underestimating the risks associated with humans leaving Earth for any considerable period of time.
Radiation is the first issue. NASA will not plan a mission that exposes astronauts to higher than a 3% risk of exposure-induced death. Their reports from 2010 based on all the studies done up to that point put the number of "safe days" at ~0.5-1 years. That assumes a healthy mid-30s non-smoker during a solar minimum. So just getting to Mars would exceed the safe limits, even if we had a very well radiation-shielded base waiting on the planet.
Multiple years in space and Mars gravity will also have severe impacts on bone density and muscles. You're never going to be able to fly to Mars, spend a few years, and fly back and resume your life on Earth without long-lasting health effects.
This is the problem with your argument that I'm underestimating risks. You're assuming that nobody finds a way to solve this problem or to mitigate the effects of the radiation, and that nobody would be willing to find a way to go even with the health concerns. I know this will be extremely difficult and quite costly, but I think hard work and constant innovation will solve a lot of the specific problems that you pose today.
> Multiple years in space and Mars gravity will also have severe impacts on bone density and muscles. You're never going to be able to fly to Mars, spend a few years, and fly back and resume your life on Earth without long-lasting health effects.
Prove it. Until you do, I disagree. Also, so what if it's true? Hundreds of millions of people on Earth voluntarily partake in long-lasting negative health effects habits. Why can't "living on Mars for a bit" be one of them?
Well I can't personally __prove__ it, but I believe the general belief in the science community of prolonged space-travel is that it will most likely mess you up. Probably in more ways than we've even thought of. I don't think, at least with today's tech, that a human can travel to Mars and back and be perfectly okay.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/space-dangers.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_19158_the-6-weirdest-dangers-...
To be fair, we don't know what 3/8 g will to do someone after a year. For all that it's important, though, it's comical that we haven't put some spinning Skylab space stations up to find out.
Gravity plays an essential role in bone maintenance. You can work this out from first principles if you know anything about biology, or read about NASA's findings.
This has been known for a long time, well before humans ever went to space. For example, HG Wells' First Men on the Moon described the very weak chests/ rib cages of the moon's citizens due to low gravity resulting in very low bone density. When the explorers from earth struck them, their chests crumpled like a beetle might on earth. Wells either learned this from other scientists or worked out the logic himself.
We honestly don't know how much gravity people need to survive. Your talk of people's chests collapsing because you read it in science fiction is just that: science fiction. HG Wells is great but he's not really a good source of science for modern astrophysics.
Odds are, there are many bodily functions that work just fine in a little bit of gravity, and others that scale up as you get more and more gravity.
We really need to get some spinning space stations set up to find this stuff out. Unfortunately, NASA has a really big fetish for "let's spend money on microgravity research" instead of just doing the obvious thing of seeing how 1/6 g or 3/8 g affects people and systems.
The "send people to die on mars" idea isn't about developing the technology to allow travelling back and forth, it is a compromise with todays technology to say "let's go and explore, until we have the technology". So you can't shoot down the argument with "when we have the technology...".
Unless we can develop drugs that trick the body into maintaining the correct muscle and bone density.
The "safe limits" have already been exceeded by people on the ISS.
If NASA has decided that we can't send people into space if there is a 3% chance of them getting cancer at some point later in their lives, then NASA has decided that they aren't going to send anyone to Mars, and it's time for us to find someone else who will.
Upon landing, Polyakov opted not to be carried the few feet between the Soyuz capsule and a nearby lawn chair, instead walking the short distance. In doing so, he wished to prove that humans could be physically capable of working on the surface of Mars after a long-duration transit phase.
That was 18 years ago ...
It is entirely possible to place a doctor within the group and send medical supplies, but it could work only for the simplest medical conditions. I think it would be a long time before it would be possible to perform open heart surgeries on Mars, or even fill a tooth.
However, with the right provisions fairly advanced procedures should be possible to carry out with minimum personnel. For instance, in 1961 a Russian doctor in Antarctica removed his own infected appendix [1].
It's not like we can't ship anesthetics up there. It's not like a layman can't set a broken bone, although I dunno if an X-ray machine would be there to see.
My worry would not be that I'd get stuck with a bunch of peasants, but that the standards would be so high, with regards to education and useful skills, that I would not qualify for the trip.
If I was trying to pitch myself at the interview, I'd point out all my experience maintaining older equipment with limited resources. (I'm sure they'd point out that nearly all my repair experience is board-level, not component-level, which is the right thing when you have a lot of cheap spares, such as when dealing with older equipment on earth, but completely the wrong thing when you are in an environment where you have to bring or manufacture everything you use.) I'd also point out my years of 24x7 pager experience, (and my experience in knowing where my burn out point is- I will push back rather than work myself to burn-out) Of course, they'd point out that there exist outliers who can work harder and longer than I can without burn-out, and I'm sure a few of them also know how to spot burn-out coming up.
So, yeah; I would assume that if they were taking a credible run at it, they'd get some really good people (including some good medical personnel.)
I'm in my early 20's and I have big plans and dreams here on Earth. I would drop them instantly for the chance to go to Mars, one way trip or no.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things -- not because they are easy; but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept; one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win -- and the others, too."
If you think of society as a single entity then the notion of 'bringing people back' doesn't have as much meaning as it used to. We don't need martian resources (other than the space) and anything else is a souvenir. People had to go and come back from the Americas because of the lack of video (no other way to see it) and because we wanted something the Americas had (gold, wood, coal, cotton etc).
We went to the Moon a few times, but it didn't have very much of anything we needed. Also you can pull up a video of what it's like to walk or drive on the moon anytime you want.
While I agree the full return trip is a higher, more noble goal I just don't see the same forces at work that will require regular back and forth trips.
That difference may not make sense to you, but it really doesn't matter if you don't understand it. Nobody is trying to convince you to do it yourself.
Personally, I remember being most astonished that their team only had one technical person: http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/team
...but for all this to work, you'd need good, reliable and "cheap" space propulsion systems, not the current toys. This is where all the work and hype should be, not over the colonization plans and how to grow veggies over there: propulsion, propulsion, propulsion, everything else on 4th, 5th, 6th etc. place.
You want Mars to appeal enough that you can get dozens or hundreds or people who have both the means and will to do it.
I would totally take this serious, it isn't convenient to go now for me, but in 10 yrs time, or less, I think this would be something I would really like to do. And I wouldn't be bothered by being confined in small space. However, I already can think of ways to expand that space, so this assumptions are not quite correct. I would probably not live super long due to radiation, but I would accept this for chance to go somewhere no-one had gone before.
I am fairly confident that living on Mars would bring significant discoveries.
Is the guy proposing this going himself to set an example?
If there is going to be any kind of colony, it needs some means of sustaining life and babies.
You go out and build things. We'll ship all the stuff the first people need for several years, but they will need to learn to find their own water, manufacture plastics, grow food, and all that stuff.
As an aside, it's a shame that the artist's rendition reminds me of a trailer park in a Florida retirement "encampment". I have no intention of retiring somewhere that's populated by snow-birds (well ... if I actually retire. Retirement sounds terribly boring).
A good analogy (I think) would be the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Sure it is trivial to build today with our technology, as (I hope) it will be trivial to travel to Mars in the distant future, but the reason its a great wonder of the world is because, despite a lack of modern technology, it was built as a national engineering project that spanned decades. Just like a mission to Mars, it was a daunting task (one that required a generation or two of slaves perhaps) that was pulled off through pure grit.
Heh. It sounds like a lot of fun, really. I mean, in 2022, I'll be 42; I mean, I'd need more information, (and I might be disqualified just for not being immediately ready to jump, but eh.) but it does sound like an incredible way to spend the second half of my life, even if it ends up making that second half, uh, significantly shorter.
What are you betting on?
It's about building a colony. Regular supply missions and growing stuff on Mars would be part of the plan.
See the Sahara for example, or even your own deserts in US. Closer, more clement climate and no less resources.
Why colonize a far away deserts when we have enough on Earth?
Because any catastrophe that would destroy earth probably would destroy your desert too?
Mars is the first step for dealing with that problem.